5 Important Social Media Stats That Will Boost your Brand

In the social media game, statistics and numbers are your best friend.

Stats tell you what posts works and what doesn’t, which targets work, which words to use, etc. Without statistical reports, which you can access with ease on Facebook and Twitter, you’re left to fend for yourself, simply looking at surface stats (such as likes, comments, and shares) to see what’s successful.

We’ve created a few articles in the past that have talked about stats you can look up your own. This post, however, is dedicated to the broader stats that encapsulates all of social media and looks at it from a much larger standpoint. These are the numbers that are going to completely change your outlook on using social media and any future campaigns you run.

You want something that’s going to stand out on someone’s busy timeline. You could write the Shakespeare of social media statuses, but it won’t matter because they’re just words tossed into an endless clutter of words, and Facebook’s incapability of allowing YouTube videos to feature more prominently only makes a status look unappealing.

The way to consistently attract prospective users is through imagery, the only type of status that’s visually appealing and takes up a lot of space on someone’s timeline, enough for it to get noticed. Nobody has the time to sift through status after status to read the message, because they’d rather just have a funny or informative image tell them the same thing in fewer words.

Put yourself in your shoes at work. On Monday you’re catching up on everything you put off from last week, while on Tuesday and Wednesday you’re fully immersed in the work you were meant to do that week. These are the productive days of work; the days where slacking off is at a minimum and the weekend is still too far to catch a glimpse of.

Thursday and Friday, however, represent the home stretch of the work week. It’s the days that tell you you’re almost finished with another week of work and a weekend of relaxation is near.

Considering you probably got most of your work done earlier in the week, combined with the weekend so close by, people who work on weekdays are going to be a lot more susceptible to being distracted from their work once Thursday and Friday come around. Since they’re getting bored and distracted at work, it’s up to you to keep your audience to continue neglecting their work, in order to answer or comment on the engaging status you made.

Kids these days. They walk around with their necks crooked and heads bent into their phone. They brush their teeth and look into their screen getting stained by droplets of toothpaste. They even eat and ignore their companions because they’re looking into their phone.

So naturally they’re also going to go to sleep and wake up on it, too. What may have been true a few years ago about social media posting times is no longer true because of the rise of smartphones. With greater dependency on smartphones, the greater the opportunity for marketers to take advantage in the early morning hours between 7-9 AM.

Social media is meant to be used as an escape. Whether it’s from work or just to cure boredom, it’s always there for you to access and provide you with endless entertainment. It’s the perfect distraction for workers because of how easy it is to access, which allows them to momentarily scroll through their Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines, before they are forced to carry on with their usual work activities.

The weekends are meant to be a distraction from everything. This is the time of week where people are busiest with their own personal lives and taking care of everything they weren’t able to get to over the week because of work. As a result, there isn’t much time for them to be bored and on their phones, distracting them from the trivial matters of life.

Face it, there just isn’t much that’s appealing on cable TV these days. It’s basically one poorly scripted reality show after another and the only shows worth watching seem to be on HBO, a channel that you need to pay for.

Since it’s unlikely the 18-34-year-old demographic is extremely interested in reality shows about pawn shops, they have shifted their attention to another constant stream of visual information in YouTube. What YouTube has provided to this key demographic is the benefit of watching episodes without commercials and, sometimes, for free.

Even if there is a slight charge, it’s still worth it because you’ll likely be able to access every episode of a show without having to leave the computer. Even if they’re not watching full episodes, they’re still accessing videos they’re interested in that they can’t get anywhere else.

Take fans of the NBA, for example. Would they rather wait for ESPN to show highlights for their favorite time, or would they prefer going to the NBA’s YouTube channel where they can access highlights of their team, as well as relevant videos showcasing the highlights of other teams and the best highlights of the night. It’s no contest which one they’d prefer.

If you access YouTube now, you’ll notice that nearly every video now has an advertisement running before it; some 15 seconds, some 30 seconds, some you can skip, and some you can’t. Regardless, these ads are still being seen, often times by millions of people if the channel has a strong enough following.